A lonely, friendless, god-forsaken crib where, for years, an erased boy lay in death's greedy embrace

How, in these times of 24/7 news, could no one notice the vanishing of a beautiful soul?

-  ROY CURTIS

HE slept beneath forlorn marshland soil, a child and his silenced heart, alone save for a ghostly salt wind from the Irish Sea keening through the overgrown meadow grass that roofed his unmarked subterranean cell.

A tenement grave for a forgotten soul.

Not on Russia's frigid Siberian steppes, nor in the isolated, sand-blown Saharan wilderness could there be a lonelier, more desolate patch of land than that parcel of indifferent dirt that engulfed Daniel Aruebose's tiny, lifeless form.

A loveless, wooded wasteland. And below it an underground penitentiary for a dead and invisible boy.

The Dublin-Belfast train rumbles along nearby flights descending into Dublin Airport peer down at Donabate and its energetic bustle. Yet cheek by jowl with the tumult, unnoticed, lay a mound of once disturbed earth.

Housing a collection of bones that was once a child.

A solitary, friendless, god-forsaken crib. A mattress of loamy grime where, for years, an erased boy lay in death's greedy embrace.

The song of Daniel's life had barely arrived at the opening note when he was interred in that shallow tomb and the hungry earth swallowed not just his body but, it seems, pretty much every memory of his brief existence.

For years, his absence went unrecorded. He vanished without a single alarm bell sounding. In an age of 24/7 news, of ceaseless online hysteria, when everybody has an opinion on everything, a child disappeared into the silence.

As if he had never happened.

Though Daniel had been on the radar of Tusla, the Child and Family Agency confirming it had previous dealings with the family, nobody seemed to notice that a former light on their screen had dissolved into darkness.

Weeks turned into months, which turned into years.